Shadows and Fog

Shadows and fogs

Memories of fogs
Cold fall days
Mornings whitened by reeks
Metal stink of progress
Of smokestack prosperity in
Mid century

Walking with the soft crunch of cheap pavement
Of cookie cutter developments.
The white leeches the color
And reduces all but the
Nearest to colorless shapes.

In a time of comparative peace,
In a world trying to turn the
Page on immeasurable darkness.
A child of my time and place in
A world just beginning
A rising binge of excesses in
Shifting rules.

From object to object
Seeing most of them only abruptly
When at arms length
And then only the part showing through..

Parents paying their own bills
In the coin of the realm
And in the tense silence
Of a cigarette smoked alone in the dark.

A manic childhood of the baby boom
Overflowing busses and classrooms
Reading what I was given and what I found
And what I could get grownups to give me.
Ozma and Verne
School readers that had survived the
Attitudes of the House Committee on
Un-American Activities,
Del Ray and Heinlein
Juvies sneaking real tales among the
Mindless pap of those that I knew as
I read them would never stick.

A father whose world had shrunk
To a sight picture
And the endless haunting
Butchers bill trying to live the good
Life as best he could and provide for his
Children all the things
He believed he had promised
By surviving on crutches but
Whole at war’s end.

A mother whose childhood had
Been too short in poverty
Who faced the world with
The bantam rooster attitude well known
To every one who had seen her stance.

The stories they would tell
Passed through me and became me
In the endless alchemy of parents and
Children.